Rising temperature trends,
alongside other anticipated effects of climate change, will pose formidable
challenges to development. To be
effective, policy responses require the most current and reliable science
available. Since this knowledge is
continually evolving, we reviewed research published over the last year on the
link between climate change and sustainable development, and have composed this
summary of what we think will become key papers on this topic.

We reviewed all issues of Nature and Science published since May 2011 and searched through additional journals
such as Climate Policy, Nature Climate Change, and Population and Environment. To be considered for this summary, papers had
to present new findings based on rigorous research methods, which excluded many
of the policy and viewpoint pieces in which climate change and sustainable
development are central. Accordingly, we
looked for papers that could readily translate scientific research into impacts
on society. Pure climate science papers,
such as paleoclimate reconstructions, were therefore outside our
scope of review. The final six we
selected can be grouped into three related categories: direct ecosystem service
provision, species-level responses, and effects on human societies.

One category examines ecosystem
service provision within the climate context.
While tropical deforestation and land-use changes contribute a
significant share of total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, Pan et al.[1] improve upon existing forest
carbon flux inventories and find a global net annual carbon sink. By assembling data from newly available
inventories and developing a series of statistical models, they find a slowdown
in deforestation for the 2000-2007 period and an expansion in carbon sinks in
temperate zones because of forest maturation in formerly agricultural lands and
higher biomass density. Improving our
knowledge of biological carbon sinks is required for informing scientific
limits on emissions and determining forestry's role in mitigation instruments
like REDD+.

A new piece in the open-access Environmental Research Letters by Xiao and Cai[2] offers projections of gross and
net arable land areas for 2100.
Combining global topographic and soil datasets with historical and
projected climatic data from 13 general circulation models, they find highly
heterogeneous effects across regions.
Their results support existing studies that suggest northern zones,
like Russia, China, and the US, will experience an expansion in arable lands,
while tropical areas will likely face a contraction. Net global potential
arable land areas, after accounting for increases in human settlements and
protected areas, could see a 2-9% reduction over the current baseline.

Species-level responses to
climate change constitute the second category of papers on our list. A group of British and Taiwanese researchers have reassessed [3] range shifts of different
species in response to rising temperatures and found statistically significant
positive correlations. Ordered in
different taxonomic groups and regions, the median latitudinal and altitudinal
migration distances were 16.9 km/decade and 11.0 m/decade, respectively. There
is no significant lag in latitudinal species response, whereas there appears to
be a significant lag in altitudinal response. Multiple geographic, ecological
and physiological constraints are responsible for the range in responses
expected across species. While the precise
relationship of how these drivers interact has yet to be completely unpacked, Chen
et al. find a near uniform migration away from rising temperatures. This has wide-ranging implications for the
stability of ecosystems, biodiversity, and disease ecology.

Stationary species do not have
the option of escaping increased temperatures and so are forced to adapt
otherwise. As a recent study[4] has found, elevated temperatures
constitute another source of stress to coral reefs – next to ocean
acidification –
by damaging carbon-delivering symbionts. Drawing together previous
findings, the strongly heterogeneous and non-linear responses across taxa are
attributed to a multitude of interdependent factors, including the speed of
warming and acidification, the availability of genetic diversity, energetic
constraints, and local physical and biological
conditions. The authors conclude that accelerated rates of coral depletion can
be expected considering the current CO2 emissions trajectory. The vital role coral reefs play within marine ecosystems may
thus be increasingly compromised in the future.

There were two notable papers
published in the last year that address direct links between global climate
change and human impacts. Hsiang et al. [5] assert that the El
Niño Southern Oscillation
(ENSO) has driven civil conflicts in the past, particularly in regions that are
so-called ENSO “teleconnected”. While the connection between climate
and conflict has been anecdotally suggested in the past, this is the first
quantitative demonstration of the link with conclusive results. They define
their baseline control as the probability of new social conflicts arising
during a La Niña event, and show that this doubles in teleconnected areas during an El Niño event.
While this study cannot be generalized to include effects of gradual global
climate change, it is an important step to understanding how changing
environmental conditions can generate social conflict.

The second paper, by Curtis and Schneider[6], links dynamic population
forecasts and climate change projections to estimate demographic shifts at the
sub-national scale. They focus
specifically on sea level rise in several coastal counties in the United States
on a timespan of 5-30 years. The population of the sample area in 2000 was 12.5
million, with a projected 19.3 million affected by 2030. They find significant
spatial variability of impacts on the countywide scale, and that impacts extend
to external counties through changing migration streams. This variability may
place a disproportionate burden on low-income households with reduced adaptive capacity.
Additional studies using the same methodology would provide key
information to development planners and governments in a changing global
environment.